Does the article conflate overtaking an incumbent's product in market share and overtaking it in Google trends? I don't think these are the same things. They wo

Does the article conflate overtaking an incumbent's product in market share and overtaking it in Google trends? I don't think these are the same things. They would if both relied almost exclusively on Google searches / ads / SEO as a channel, but I don't think Adobe sells the same as the other companies. It may not care about Google trends / SEO because it does enterprise deals. They have the sales people to do that. Adobe has gone +50% from 2020 to 2021, and the trend seems to keep going up. I'm not attributing that to Photoshop, though. Second, a company may have millions of users and still have no/little/less revenue. This also often would mean no support. That could be fine with a certain category. Many of the companies cited in the article are private companies, so we don't really know much about their finances. >Microsoft Teams: Slack >Well...they don’t. Baremetrics sold. Slack sold. You can’t compete against freemium when you’re able to offer the primary value for free. The existing market leaders can’t match your pricing without giving up millions in recurring revenue and they’re not going to do that. Slack does have a free tier. Am I misunderstanding the paragraph as meaning that Slack lost because it didn't have one? The freemium model can be interesting if an additional user is one entry in a database, and you don't incur that much cost from usage. For example, we make a machine learning / MLOps (oh yeah) platform at https://iko.ai https://iko.ai. Users train models models on data, which means GPU, RAM, and storage. Unless you are venture backed and can spend money on free users to onboard a lot of users fast, it's not sustainable. We're not venture backed, and we're not really looking to be for now, which means our clients belong to a different segment. Now, it is not excluded that the revenue generated thanks to these paying customers will subsidize free users, and we are engineering our way out of this conundrum. But someone has to pay for all that compute. One of our colleagues was supervising about thirty students doing their final year projects in machine learning, and we let them use our platform to be able to complete their projects and get their degrees. We provided support that you'd find in an enterprise offering, and we spent a lot of nights hanging out in the Slack channels helping them troubleshoot and optimize their code, giving guidance on how to train and use the models, seeing it through their graduation. You can't really generalize that level of support for all free users, and when it came to students, we couldn't just shrug it off and not support them just because they were free users, as this was personal.